Southern California -- this just in

'Parking guru' wants you to pay more for the right to park your car

October 16, 2010 | 1:09
pm

UCLA professor Donald Shoup is credited by many for fomenting a long-overdue revolution in parking. At 72, he is invited to expound his theories at brown-bag seminars and transportation conferences all over the world, from San Francisco to Sydney, where he'll speak in November.

According to Shoup, free parking is at the root of many urban ills: congestion, sprawl, wasteful energy use and air pollution.

City governments contribute to all these ills by requiring too many parking spaces for all development, Shoup asserts. The high cost of the required parking, he says, increases the prices we pay for everything else, including housing. "We have expensive housing and free parking," he says. "We have our priorities the wrong way around."